How Do You Make Christmas More?

“She’s going to tell me Christmas is too commercial. And that I need to remember that Jesus is the reason for the season.”

You obviously don’t know me.

I love Christmas. I love twinkly lights and decorating sugar cookies and candlelight services and presents. I love presents. I’ve already started my Christmas shopping — NOT because I’m organized but just because it’s so much fun!

This Christmas, I’m not going to encourage you to do less. The opposite, in fact. You should make Christmas more! Not more stuff. But more love. More joy. More Jesus.

Which moments during the holidays make you feel happiest? Bring you joy? Help you feel most in line with how Jesus taught us to live and care for one another?

Is it the Christmas cards? Handwrite special notes for people you love (including the child you sponsor)!

The baking? Make a basket of cookies to share with that person in your life who feels alone this year.

The gift giving? Consider giving a gift from Compassion’s Gift Catalog — not only will you honor a loved one, but you’ll also provide a life-changing gift to a child in poverty.

So go forth, and Make Christmas More this year! And let us know how you do it!

Use #MakeItMore on Instagram, Pinterest and Twitter to share your ideas for how you spread the joy of Jesus this Christmas season.

And follow all the inspiration as we post your great ideas and more to our Make It More Pinterest Board. Be sure to tag us and we’ll share your great ideas to inspire others!

Why is it so easy to be generous with my Compassion kids but so hard to do so with my biological kids? Does anyone else feel that way? I am thrilled to be generous with my Compassion kids this Christmas, but feel pained buying my biological kids more stuff (or memberships or ANYTHING that costs money), or answering relatives’ questions on what they “want.” They have everything they want and need and do not truly appreciate that. I certainly don’t just want to dump the materialistic culture on less fortunate kids, but I truly feel joy giving to my Compassion kids or the angel tree kids at church (I LOVE buying toys in that case!). It is so easy to love these kids far away, and it makes me see the flaws so much more readily in my own kids, who cannot understand what it is like to do without. Is this uneasy disconnect something other sponsors feel? My own kids disappoint me more and more these days and I tend to idealize my sponsored kids. They really inspire me. One girl wants to go to heaven someday. I struggle getting my own kids to want to go to church and make them SEE this world is so unequal.

See if you can save up to take them on a mission trip to a third-world country; I guarantee you it will change their perspective — I grew up as a missionary kid in a third-world country and I have a totally different perspective than most people here in the States.

It is really easy to admire and fall in love with Jesus, the Prophets, Apostles or some historical figures we have only learned in history class, watched on TV or read about in books, isn’t it?
You love the children you sponsor like your own flesh and blood, children whom you have never met or held in your arms, whose voice you have never heard (I’m saying all this supposing you have not yet taken any Sponsor Tour conducted by Compassion and if you have, please forgive me).
As servants of God doing His sacred will in such tangible ways, it may be easy for us to romanticize the reality of life that the poor people go through daily and we often tend to consider their lives more “dignified” or “upright” ways of human existence.
You spend your time with your own children 24 hours a day and 7 days a week and I know it could be a little bit intolerable for you to see them grow up “ungrateful” or taking every blessing “for granted”.
Such is also my frustration as well as my indignation as I live here in Japan, a culture of indifference to human pains and complacency that they are utterly intoxicated with their arrogance and self-sufficiency or “presumption”.
I’d like you to know, Kay, that as much as your sponsored children are needy in one way, so are your own children in another. Ours may not be material need, but emotional and spiritual.
As the Christmas season is just around the corner, what your children need may not be another neatly wrapped toy, but a simple message that we become rich by enriching the lives of the less fortunate.

Don’t withhold your love and affection from your own children. They are as needy as your sponsored children.